I placed an order for a new phone with O2, with which I have had an account since 2003.
After the handset was dispatched, a text from O2 told me it was thought to be a fraudulent order, the package was recalled mid-transit and my account was locked.
It took four days for O2 to confirm that my account would be reinstated once the handset was received.
A week after the cancelled delivery, I was informed by O2 that I had requested a change of number, and my phone line promptly stopped working. Its response to my complaint was to open a fraud ticket.
More days passed without word. I was told my complaint couldn’t be escalated because I don’t have an O2 account.
My nephew is in hospital, and I am a carer for my father and am no longer able to talk to them on the phone, or help manage my father’s needs.
I am also losing access to things that rely on two-step verification.
Ironically, I’ve received several emails during this time asking how I was enjoying my new phone.
LE, London
O2 managed to pick up the phone to you the day I battered down the brick wall with which it seems to repel customers. It was another 11 days before it reconnected you to your phone number with a new sim card and offered you £100 in goodwill.
Considering you were left for three weeks without a service, and spent an estimated six hours chasing O2, this strikes both of us as pretty stingy.
It has now reprocessed your order for the new phone.
It says: “While the order was correctly stopped after our systems detected potentially fraudulent activity, we accept that there were failings in our handling of this case after the customer confirmed to us that her order was legitimate.
“We have now sent LE a new sim and her account has been reconnected.”
Three fails to connect
KH of London had the opposite problem with her provider, Three. It informed her 18 months ago that she had signed a new phone contract. Only she hadn’t, and she duly notified Three, which, she says, decided she had been a victim of ID fraud and promised to close down the new account.
Precisely a year later she received a default notice for a £1,461 debt for the phone she hadn’t ordered.
Three told her not to worry; the transaction in her name had been marked as fraudulent. In a subsequent letter, however, it claimed she had ordered the phone and was liable for the debt.
The company eventually established that no handset had been dispatched, and that she owed nothing, but told her it had been unable to contact her. KH believes it was using the email address provided by the fraudster.
Four months passed and she finally received an apology for the saga and was assured, in writing, that the matter was closed. Hot on the heels of this came a letter demanding that she pay up, and thus the carousel that is Three’s customer service resumed whirling. Its responses to me were similarly dizzying.
This time, in answer to me, it insisted KH had taken out the contract herself, and then cancelled it within the cooling-off period when the phone failed to arrive. Bizarrely, it also claimed that she then returned the device that had failed to arrive, whereupon the account was closed.
It then declared that KH reported the closed account as fraudulent five weeks later. The debt collection letter was an “administration error”, it said breezily, because it had forgotten to inform its debt collection agency that she did not owe anything.
None of this makes sense to you or me. If you had ordered it, and had successfully cancelled it, why would you later claim it was fraud? If you cancelled it because the phone failed to arrive, how did you manage to return it?
The good news is, the debt hounds have been called off and you’ve been paid £200 in goodwill.
All credit to Halfords
Now and then I like to applaud a company whose customer service surpasses expectation.
DC of Malmesbury nominates Halfords: “My Halfords pressure washer, bought online, lost pressure four months out of warranty. I asked the Halfords store in Swindon if it could advise whether it was repairable. Instead, the assistant disappeared and returned with a brand new replacement complete with a two-year warranty.”